In a session yesterday afternoon about retailers and online auction sites working together to catch criminals, CVS’s corporate investigations director James Lynch and eBay fraud investigations manager Stoney Burke discussed how retailers are working with eBay to thwart e-fencing and compile cases that can be brought to law enforcement.
While Lynch acknowledged that some at the company were skeptical about working with eBay at the very beginning, they have found that the partnership has been “a huge win for both sides.” During his presentation, he highlighted three cases where CVS leveraged eBay to assist with putting together a case for law enforcement.
CVS's James Lynch
When one of CVS’s online investigators – whose job is literally to crawl websites looking for CVS product – found a suspicious seller on eBay, the company did their homework and went out to eBay to verify the information. eBay worked with CVS to provide information on the woman and the items she was selling – some of which still had CVS stickers attached to the merchandise. During surveillance outside the woman’s home, CVS investigators noticed a number of known shoplifters in the immediate area. Armed with this information, the case was taken to police, who were immediately able to execute two search warrants. The woman, who had sold $174,000 through her eBay account, was arrested last September and is still being held.
Earlier this year, CVS started seeing increased losses in the Cape Cod, MA area. After the company’s eBay investigator crawled the internet, they found a potential culprit: an area woman who had been released from prison in January was selling CVS products with a retail value totaling thousands of dollars, and had sold over 500 items on eBay in a two-month period. “A lot of people who are criminals don’t have any job skills,” Lynch said. “This is their new form of employment.” CVS and eBay worked together to present a case to local law enforcement, and the woman was arrested – along with her daughter and daughter’s friend – in late March. Since the arrest violated parole, the woman’s prison sentence increased greatly.
CVS’s partnership with eBay has also helped crack an employee theft issue. An internal investigation into a store that experienced particularly high shrink uncovered an employee who was an active seller of CVS-type products on eBay. After further examination, CVS discovered that 30 items recently shipped and “never received” by the local store were listed online the same day on eBay by the suspect employee. “We had a delivery to the store and watched the items pop up on eBay,” said Lynch. “The police loved it. They took it and ran with it.”
Burke, who discussed eBay’s PROACT program, said more than 270 retailers participate in the joint sharing of information and that eBay conducts over 125 investigations a month with retail companies.